Billie Eilish’s recent Instagram story and speeches at the Grammy’s where she challenged celebrities like her to consider whether they planned to speak up or remain silent, brought back a very familiar cultural reflex. Almost immediately, viewers called her performative and hypocritical, regarding her own very luxurious life. However, this response reveals less about the limits of celebrity activism. In fact, this tells us more about the public’s increasingly narrow definition of what meaningful political engagement is allowed to look like.

The phrase “performative activism” is often deployed as a moral verdict rather than an analytical one. It implies that unless advocacy is conducted quietly with no reputational benefit, it isn’t legitimate or worthy of consideration. This expectation collapses almost immediately. For celebrities, activism cannot exist outside performance. To demand otherwise is to misunderstand both fame and political communication when these “performances” are how issues are brought into light. Performative activism is still activism, not because performance is inherently virtuous, but because performance is how messages travel in a society saturated with constant media interference.

Eilish’s intervention matters simply because it recognizes activism on multiple platforms, one of which was televised internationally. By publicly calling on other celebrities to speak and expressing her own stances on current political concerns, she becomes the catalyst for responses from a large audience, larger than what the typical civilian protesting outside a school or shop could do. Social change develops through pressure and normalization, and downplaying that completely ignores the complexity of activism on a large platform. When high-profile figures engage publicly, recalibration of what feels acceptable or expected within a cultural moment is inevitable and necessary. Outcomes are not negated by the presence of self-interest or personal gain. Political history is full of actors whose motivations were mixed, opportunistic, or strategic, but through all of these motivations change has occured in some way or another.

While we maintain that public advocacy limited to pure symbolism is inherently incorrect, constant fixation on authenticity as a sort of prerequisite for credibility has become a severely overused excuse for cynicism. Performativity does not undermine the impacts of large scale advocacy.

The views in this column do not necessarily reflect the views of the HiLite staff. Reach Amy Xu at [email protected].